Archive: Robb responds to radical feminism, challenges bishops

“Council of Bishops, are you listening? We will not bow our knee to Sophia,” the Rev. Edmund Robb Jr. said at the 1994 Good News “Summer Celebration ” in Dallas. “We will no longer support heresy with our money! … We demand something new and bold and courageous,” he said. “And we ask you to take a firm stand with historic Christianity and denounce the heresy that is plaguing our church today.”

On the closing  night of the national, three-day event, Robb gave an evangelical response to “biblical faith and radical feminism.” Christians must support feminism as fair treatment but “hold the line ” against feminism as anti-Christian ideology, he said.

Robb, a United Methodist clergyman who heads an evangelistic association based in Marshall, Texas, is a former Good News board chairman and is now board chairman of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Before his presentation, the Good News board honored him for 30 years in evangelistic ministry.

In his hard-hitting address, Robb defended Christianity and evangelicals in their historic support of women, charged that the contemporary feminist movement has strayed from its mission of full and equal citizenship for women, and condemned the “radical feminist movement as represented in the ‘Re-Imagining’ Conference in Minneapolis” in November 1993.

The Church of Jesus Christ is the “greatest women’s liberation movement in history,” Robb declared. “Wherever the Christian faith has gone, women have been elevated and liberated,” he said. Evangelicals, he continued, should “rejoice in the new freedom and opportunities for women in the western world ” and “repent that we have not been in the forefront of the struggle for feminine rights and dignity.”

Drawing particular criticism from Robb were “contemporary expressions of ‘Christian’ feminism [that] strike at the very heart of the orthodox faith.”

“Some have accused us of trying to suppress freedom of expression in our criticism of the ‘Re-Imagining’ Conference,” he observed. The accusers are “free to say anything they like, but if they do not uphold the basic doctrines of the church, they ought to have the integrity to get out.”

Robb said “most feminists deny or question the authority and divine inspiration of the Scriptures,” and “many radical feminists base the authority of their faith on the emotionally unstable experiences they have had as oppressed women, rather than the objective truth of the Bible.”

On the issue of inclusive language, he said that evangelicals object to the “neuterizing or feminizing of God language … [beyond] simply the meaning of words [to] the very nature of God … Jesus has taught us to pray ‘Our Father,’ and as evangelicals we will follow his teachings.” Arguing that the Christian faith is one of revelation and not the product of human experience, Robb said, “God reveals himself only in masculine terms .” He said the Minneapolis event has given visibility to the agenda of “radical feminism,” which “questions the centrality and uniqueness of Christ; denies the reality of personal sin; defends homosexual and lesbian life styles; and is anti-male, anti-family, and anti-traditional values.”

The “Re-Imagining” Conference’s “worship of the goddess Sophia has shocked many in the church,” Robb said, and should be seen as “beyond the bounds of tolerance for orthodox believers.”

Criticizing the Council of Bishops for not repudiating the Minneapolis event, he said, “The greatest enemy of the church is the institutionalist who defends every program and activity, regardless of the consequences, and opposes any call for reform. This kind of leadership will destroy the church.”

Robb said United Methodist evangelicals are often called divisive and are urged to read John Wesley’s sermon, “The Catholic Spirit,” in which the founder of Methodism says, “As to matters that do not strike at the root of Christianity, we think and let think.”

To that, Robb responds, “We are dealing with matters that deal with the root of our faith. I suggest that the contemporary feminist movement with its gnostic New Age heresy is striking at the root of Christianity.”

Adapted from United Methodist News Service

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